When the members of Congress met last week in a tremendous debate about authorizing war against Iraq, their arguments and counter arguments were full of references to history. Members talked about Socrates and Abraham Lincoln; the Mexican-American War and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C.E. They cited St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, James Madison and Winston Churchill. Some talked about the appeasement of Hitler at Munich and Mussolini in Ethiopia; others about the Tonkin Gulf resolution that led to our deep entanglement in the Vietnam war.
This was not a way of fancying up their speeches for an important occasion or showing off their learning in a Congressional version Trivial Pursuits. When it came to this critical moment, members of Congress drew on history to help them think about and explain the decision they were making---to each other and to the American people.
Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas explained why he was in favor of patience and giving the sanctions more time to work with a story about Robert E. Lee riding away from Appomattox Court House over' a battlefield. where the dead still lay and saying to himself, " ... All this could have been avoided. All we needed to avoid this war were a few men of courage, of vision and forbearance."
Representative Stephen Solarz of New York rejected the appeal for patience with an account of what preceded the U.S. entry to World War 11: "We were patient when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. We were patient when Germany blitzkrieged Poland in 1939. We were patient when Germany overran France in 1940. We were patient ... right up to December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, by which time Germany had conquered almost all of Europe and Japan controlled much of Asia."
Different people drew different lessons from history because, as Senator William Cohen of Maine said, the past offers "no absolutes, no blueprints ... that will provide a clear guide to the right decision". History was a tool the speakers used to reason and think about the crisis in the Persian Gulf . They used it to frame the debate about what the U. S. should do and to make clear exactly where they stood. And they used it to help the American people, to whom they were also speaking, to understand the issues.
No one could have followed the debates, or had an intelligent opinion about the wisest course of action in the Gulf, without at least a basic knowledge of history. And that made me wonder how much longer we'll be able to count on Americans' grasp of history and, therefore, oil our ability to make intelligent decisions about the present and the future of our country. In fact, I wonder if we can count on the grasp of our young adults now.
There is a lot of discussion about what sort of education will best prepare students for the world of tomorrow. People are preoccupied with the rapid pace of change. They look at new technology, at the information evolution, at the expansion of knowledge in many fields and ask: "What's the point of teaching kids a particular body of knowledge? Things students learn today will be obsolete or irrelevant the day after tomorrow. Anyway, they can look up what they need to know."
History is especially vulnerable to these questions about the value of content in a changing world. Many people are already mistaken about what it is. They think history is just a bunch of old facts and, dates instead of a collection of stories about important episodes in our past. You have to know the facts, but understanding the stories involves a lot more than that because they tell about patterns of events and human motivations---about the times when people were weak or strong: when they showed patience or needed to show it and failed.
As the members of Congress debated about the best way to deal with the Persian Gulf crisis, you could see that their knowledge of history gave them a common set of understandings. These understandings allowed them to talk together about the issues even when they were coming to different conclusions, just the way people who know numbers and are dealing with the same ones can sometimes end up with different answers and different analyses. And these understandings are as important to our political life as a common language or languages because without them discussion is not possible.
So when kids say, "Why Should I study history?" one of the answers is so they can become good citizens so they can participate in and understand debates like last week's and thus help ensure that such debates continue. (And so they won't be like some of the young people were hearing on radio and television right now---the ones who've gotten their opinions about the world and the war from slogans and 30-second news tidbits and who are glad to shout these opinions into any microphone thrust in their faces.)
But it's more than that. This debate, which was one of the high points in our recent history showed how exciting -- and even essential it can be to apply ideas to events and grope for solutions. It would be a good thing, for our kids to be prepared for that, too.